Alison Frankel

Tags:

A few months ago, plaintiffs’ lawyers at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd created quite a stir when they filed thousands of pages of deposition transcripts and other juicy discovery in an investors’ fraud case against Morgan Stanley, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. The documents — exhibits to the investors’ summary judgment motion — included never-before-seen internal communications between Morgan Stanley and the rating agencies as they worked on a structured investment vehicle known as Cheyne, putting on public display the allegedly half-cocked evaluations that Moody’s and S&P performed in 2005, when they were swamped with subprime mortgage-backed financial instruments to rate.

Tags:

With U.S. markets fretting Tuesday at the prospect of a downgrade in the government’s triple-A credit rating, you may be wondering: Who can we sue? Litigation, after all, is practically an unalienable American right. The problem, however, is that any attempt to sue the credit rating agencies for downgrading U.S. securities will run smack into the Bill of Rights. The rating agencies, as many a disgruntled mortgage-backed securities investor has discovered in the last few years, are shielded from liability because their ratings are considered to be public opinion protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Author Profile

Alison Frankel updates On the Case multiple times throughout the day on WestlawNext Practitioner Insights. A founding editor of the Litigation Daily, she has covered big-ticket litigation for more than 20 years. Frankel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The American Lawyer and several other national publications. She is also the author of Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin.